[mitcheme]

I think you're mistaken about the model of family that "most of the rest of humans" have. There is way more variation than arguments like this tend to give credit to. Traditional Hawaii, everyone your age is a sibling and everyone your parents' age is a parent. Other parts of traditional China, the family group you belong to depends on your father entirely. Your biological mother is not related to you, since her father was part of a different family. Parts of Native America, your mother's sisters are also your mothers, and your father's brothers are your fathers, but your father's sisters and mother's brothers are aunts and uncles. These are just basic systems of reckoning, it gets quite a bit more complicated once you look at the actual living arrangements that go with them (where do couples go to live, where do the children live, how do marriages or whatever other sexual arrangements work). By population, nowadays there are fewer that vary from the western norm, but if you count up what was going on pre-globalization, we are not in the majority. These different family systems are fading away because of modern-day western influence only, and I think that might have a lot more to do with the military (and more recently, economic power) than the custody arrangements. You can't simply point to everything western and say, "this is why we won".

I don't believe it is consistent. Based on the Masuo you can see that women will have less sex if they start being treated like western women. You can't look at how women behave in western culture and use them as proof that women have a lower sex drive, because we know that evidence has been tainted.

[sliverstorm]

So, taking your pristine example of the Masuo, we can just compare how many partners women had to how many men had...

OH WAIT!

You only said 'women had 50 on average. That's a lot. Clearly they have sex drive.'

No one is debating whether they have sex drive. The article stated they had lower RELATIVE drive. You cannot refute this point with only statistics about women. Your facts are meaningless without the counterpoint male statistics from the Masuo.

I apologize for my slight snarkyness, but you are blatantly ignoring key truths about the article in an attempt to argue your point. Especially as that has already been pointed out to you and you continued to ignore it, I am somewhat irked.

[scott_s]

Interesting points. And I agree that the reduction in other systems of family are a result of military and economic power. But the article is proposing a theory for how the Western military and economic powers were able to outcompete the others - for how such an imbalance in military and economic power was able to develop. I agree that you can't point to everything and say "this is why," but I don't believe he has done that. He provided extensive arguments.

Masuo women may have sex with less partners, but has it been confirmed that they have less sex?